MH2O Chronicles

MH2O: Checking body position with video

Tuesday October 5th: Evaluating Body Position and Arm Extension using Video

I took underwater video of most of the swimmers present on Tuesday October 5th. My objective was to evaluate body position and check a hunch that many of the swimmers are extending upward instead of forward, or forward and slightly down and that this was contributing toward putting them in a "swimming uphill" body position. The pictures are taken at full extension, just before starting the downward movement into the catch.

Here's Michael Phelps in this point in the stroke, note the relatively flat body position and the slight downward angle of the extended arm:

Here are pictures of several of our swimmers at this point in their stroke:

Not bad body position but the elbow is dropped:

Not bad body position/angle, but probably over-rotated and the extension is a little too deep:

Conclusion? Just telling these swimmers to extend a little deeper isn't working, it's time to get drilling! They may not realize that when rotated onto one side the shoulder is well below the surface so an arm extended straight forward should be an equal distance under the surface.

Most of these pictures were captured from these two videos:
video 1

video 2

The complete set of videos taken is posted on the MH2O Video Channel (the userid is a holdover from the previous club name.

Posted at 03:08PM Oct 07, 2010 by Lindsay in General  |  Comments[0]